Judaism as a Gendered Civilization: The Legacy of Mordecai Kaplan's Magnum Opus

In his 1934 masterwork, Judaism as a Civilization, Mordecai M. Kaplan raises a question that challenges American Jews at the start of the twenty-first century. The issue of how to live in two civilizations, not as reluctant bystanders or as bitter critics of American society and culture but as deeply committed Americans and Jews able to embrace the best in both civilizations, lies at the heart of the enterprise of American Jews. Despite dramatic changes in the conditions of American Jewish life, Kaplan's arguments and analyses continue to address contemporary concerns.¹ His desire for Jews to develop a creative Judaism, a program that, in his words, "spells nothing less than a maximum of Jewishness," and his recognition that such a program requires a "type of courage that is not deterred by uncharted regions," still confronts Jews.² Born in Lithuania in 1881, arriving in the United States with his family at the age of nine, Kaplan received the best education of both Jewish and American worlds. As Mel Scult's definitive biography demonstrates, Kaplan's education positioned him to understand and interpret the dilemmas facing his rapidly secularizing Jewish contemporaries in the United States.³ No less important, Kaplan wrote about Judaism implicitly as a gendered civilization, and he proposed (in a way few contemporary thinkers did) that most distinctions separating men and women be eliminated.

Kaplan was not a fabrente (fervent) feminist in a radical ideological sense. He was no Emma Goldman. But his approach to women in Judaism reflected egalitarian principles. Rabbi Rebecca Alpert has argued that Kaplan recognized that equality ultimately could come about only through women's "own efforts and initiative. Whatever liberal-minded men do," he wrote, would largely remain in the realm of "a futile and meaningless gesture. The Jewish woman must demand the equality due her as a right to which she is fully entitled."⁴ His reimagination of Judaism as a civilization produced by the Jewish people who choose to observe, beautify, and create Jewish folkways drew on what had been gendered understandings of Judaism in earlier eras to speak effectively and subtly to Jewish women. Kaplan was blessed with four daughters, born during the first two decades of the twentieth century, a time of feminist activism that culminated in granting women the right to vote on the premise that they were equal to men. He saw in his daughters—bright, articulate, talented—children with enormous potential. Like many famous rabbis before him, he chose to educate them as Jews. But, unlike these predecessors, Kaplan generalized from his own experiences. Willing to challenge traditional Jewish assumptions regarding women's place, he discovered the personal and political converging. This blend of personal and political marks Kaplan as a feminist. His commitment to contemporary American ideals of equality, pluralism, and diversity resulted in an enduring legacy that continues to influence Jewish life in the twenty-first century.

The gendered character of Kaplan's legacy appears in key terms in his magnum opus, especially folkways and civilization. Kaplan's use of folkways and civilization requires reinterpretations of key philosophic concepts of Jews, God, and Torah. Each is implicated in folkways and civilization; each is understood in new ways. But the concepts of civilization and folkways also introduce American ideas that allow Kaplan to reimagine Judaism freed from its historic gendered constraints. Possessing, as we do now, theories of gender in relation to religion, history, and culture, we can interpret decisions Kaplan made in articulating his argument.

Kaplan's choice of "civilization" in his title cast a broad net. It positioned his interpretation not as an alternative to competing forms of Judaism in his era (Reform, Conservatism, and Modern Orthodoxy) but as something larger. Kaplan recognized that he was living during a time of crisis for American Jews and that the search for conciliation among competing Jewish ideologies required boldness. Where others found stark, even irreconcilable differences between Orthodoxy and the liberal movements, Kaplan argued that in fact Reform and neo-Orthodoxy shared the same conception of religion and of...